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Tuesday, 20 August 2013

The Institution

By Sarah Begg

She opened her
eyes in darkness and silence.

Unusual, she
thought. The hum of the LED light in her cell had become such a
constant that the silence which now pervaded was strange.

Perhaps it was the
popping death of the light that had awoken her, she with inhuman
hearing. The faint white glow that lit her small chamber – that lit
all the corridors and rooms she was routinely taken through – was
always there, never wavering.

She closed her
eyes and opened them a few times, expecting the light to return.

It did not.

Turning her head,
she looked towards the door but there was only darkness there. The
corridor beyond also was unlit.

A prickled warning
crawled across the back of her neck and she remained absolutely
still.

Experience had
taught her to not do anything. They'll come back, she thought, and
turn the lights on again.

They have
broken you, a voice whispered
through her mind. You used to long for this day.

She sat up fiercely.

Swinging out of bed she dropped from the raised platform and landed
lightly on the floor with the stealth of a cat. After all the
experiments they had conducted on her – injecting her body with
drugs, sticking needles into her muscles and immersing her in acidic
substances – she was stronger, fitter and more agile than anyone on
the outside walls of the institution. Their creation, they called
her. Their masterpiece.

She crept to the door and was surprised when it slid straight open.
The locks, she knew, were highly advanced and unbreakable – she had
tried to break out of this cell enough
times to learn that. Yet being at the forefront of technology
they also had the failings of most modern creations – they needed a
power source.

She stepped cautiously into the dark corridor and her heart began to
race.

What if this was another test? There
had been so many tests she had stopped counting. Tricks and
deceptions – apparently meant to train her mind, to turn her into
their warrior, into their weapon.
If she failed a test, whenever she made the Director unhappy, the
punishments were excruciating. Even just the thought of what they
would do to her if they found her outside her room now was enough to
turn her insides to liquid.

But she had to push on. Test or not – she wasn't broken enough to
ignore an opportunity for escape, even if the chances
that this was real were slim.

Creeping down the corridor, there was no sound, no sign of anyone.
She did not need light to know where the end of the corridor was –
she had walked the length so many times before, often blindfolded.
Yet something else was missing – at the end of the corridor in the
top corner near the ceiling, there was usually a red pinprick of
light signaling that all movement was being watched in the control
room. Today, the red dot had vanished.

She reached the door and this one too swung open without resistance.

Beyond, in this corridor a faint light was present.

Sliding delicately into the wide space, she looked towards the light
source. There, at the far end of this corridor, the staircase was
lit.

She ran lightly to the stairs, her enhanced eyesight scanning the
closed doors and the ceilings as she went. In this corridor also, the
red dot of the all-seeing Directorate was missing.

She paused on the staircase, just outside the reach of the light.
Here, security was working. The red glowing eye that never blinked
guarded the stairs.

There was nothing else for it but to run.

Had anyone been watching the screens in the control room, they would
have seen a dark streak flash past, so fast she was. In the upstairs
corridor she paused in the shadows in the corner, holding her breath.
But the alarms did not begin.

There was an open door just ahead, and soft voices were trickling out
of there. There was even the sound of soft laughter – two staff
members brightening their otherwise mundane work day.

As she approached the doorway, she slid to the ground and continued
on crab-like, her body pressed close to the floor. She now suspected
no one was watching the security cameras, as the alarms were not
going off. Someone, or something, had granted her a window of
opportunity.

From her floor-level view she spied the two workers in the room. They
were wearing the white, sterile lab coats that all employees here
wore. Surrounded by beakers and potions, their faces covered by
protective goggles, in their hands they mixed concoctions of drugs
that would be used to inject their test subjects. She knew that some
did not survive the experiments. She could hear, from deep below in
her own cell, the screaming agony of those who reacted badly to the
drugs. She had even experienced her own excruciating pain when they
had given her something new. But she had survived. Even strapped down
to the hard metal table, her body cramping and spasming with the
pain, begging them to just end it for her – still, she had
survived.

She had a strong desire to kill them both. Here, right now, she had
the advantage. They had bred her for this – to kill. She could
easily slide in, kill the first one before they knew there was an
intruder. But that second one was on the wrong side of the table, and
she knew well enough that there was an emergency alarm within arms
reach. She could easily kill the second one, but the chances of them
pressing the alarm first were too high. She couldn't throw away her
slim chance of escape.

She glided past the door easily as the workers continued to chat
away.

The alarm had still not gone off, but if something was happening in
the control room she knew it would only be a short matter of time
before the watch resumed.

Springing lightly to her feet she began to run silently, her body
still crouched low to the ground so she was below window level for
the closed doors. Though it had been years since they had taken her
up this far, taken her up to ground level and allowed her to see the
sun, still the route was imprinted
permanently in her mind.

Stairs, corridors, more stairs – she couldn't believe that no one
was about, that the alarms hadn't been raised. The possibility of
this being a test was almost more than she could bear, her heart
pounding in her chest far more than it should.

Then the final door was in sight – the door that led outside.
Running flat out like a mad woman, she threw herself at the door
without thought to the locks and bolts that normally closed it.

Yet it sprang open easily and she burst out into the starry nighttime
air.

There was a body at her feet – a fallen and dead security guard,
but she sprang lithely over the top, not sparing it a second thought,
and ran on into the night. Ahead, a dense row of trees stood in front
of the electrified fence – she ran straight towards it, smelling
freedom.

As she entered the treeline her nose picked up the smell of man, her
ears twitched like a wolf's and she heard the inhale of breath just
behind the tree to her right.

Her arm sprang out and she grabbed the neck of the man who hid
there,was about to snap it when a voice shouted out.

“Stop!”

She froze on instinct, the commanding voice impossible to ignore from
her conditioning.

Yet it wasn't the voice of the Director that spoke. It was another
voice – a long ago remembered voice that she now only heard in her
dreams.

“Savante!” the man whispered, his voice breaking with emotion as
he stepped out from the trees. Her eyes, glowing eerily in the
moonlight, took him in and something in the back of her mind seemed
to break a little.

“My sister – you are alive!” he stepped forwards, his arms
outstretched.

She dropped her hold on the irrelevant man and focused on he who now
stood before her. Brother. Though she could not remember this man,
his face looked like hers. The passage of time had been so long and
yet so short in the Institution, seeing time told on the face of he
who had been just a child made her heart break.

And then the sirens started – the alarm, finally raised.

They took off at a run – she, her brother, and his group of
renegades who had infiltrated
the Institution and facilitated her escape.

They flew through the butchered hole in the electric fence and took
off into the wasteland desert beyond.